We havent really done much email marketing and have found it hard to find the time to get templates set up, batchbook integrated with mailchimp etc.

However, when the new site launches we want to be doing email marketing once a month.

I have some ideas surrounding what we would like to be doing, and we do need a strategy in place, but I was hoping that we could get some advice from our network as to what content they would like to see from us that would be useful to them.

As an FYI Please see a brief note on Resonata below

Resonata is a new kind of B2B Data Agency. Instead of coming from just a b2b data perspective – we use a mixture of business development insight, market research and b2b data knowledge to deliver your ideal clients to you – these solutions are 100% built around your individual business data project needs.

Our clients work with us because they have complex briefs, hard to reach targets and need an agency that will go out of their way to find ideal solutions to their b2b data challenges.

Resonata Ethos/Mission

At Resonata we do not believe that you are just an entry in our CRM or another invoice. We work with clients on a very individual basis and take our time to understand what you are doing and how a solution might be possible.

We are different in that we proudly position ourselves between list brokers, market research teams, and business development consultants to identify the most appropriate solutions from a business development perspective.

Our services do not only need to reflect your requirements in terms of targeting, timing and budget considerations – but also what is physically possible.

We are not right for everybody, but typically our clients value our in-depth knowledge and expertise and our commitment to responsible solutions.

As a company we pride ourselves on being: Supportive, Passionate, Inspirational, Effective, A trusted resource, Insightful, Discerning and Focussed

You may think that it is unusual for an organisation such as Resonata Consulting to blog about such a topic, because services like LinkedIn and Jigsaw etc. could be considered competitors to our prospect insight services.

However, we do not see it like that – we find that these user interface services make excellent tools for our own marketing efforts and sometimes even fit part of the solution we can offer to our clients – although the real difference is that we look at why it would be valuable to speak to a company from a B2B contact point of view.

When you are looking for decision maker business contacts within specific target accounts there are a few names that instantly come to mind and some of them are good and some not so good – believe me, we know based on experience that the more bespoke the project is the more research is needed – regardless of whether these services and companies exist.

Some of the services that people are using today include:
Jigsaw.com
Ecademy
LinkedIn
Active Contacts
Spoke
Zoom Info

As a first point of reference I will look at LinkedIn (we intend to critique the other services too) since it is one of the largest services and one that I use a lot: you may even find this blog through LinkedIn for example or you might start using LinkedIn as a result of this blog.

LinkedIn
What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is an online business network built to connect business professionals. Users sign up and setup a profile for free and start linking to other connections or professionals they know who also have LinkedIn accounts. This gives you access to not only your connections profile information but their connections and connections’ connections as well (unless they have checked the option to let people do so) In short the more connections you personally know (and sometimes don’t know) and add to your account, the larger the business network you will have access to.
How do you find business contacts?
Once you have built your network by adding connections you know, you can search through your network of contacts by various criteria such as company name, location, industry, keywords, contact names, titles and so on. By clicking on a contact name you will have access to any information that contact has made available on his/her profile which can include a lot of detail such as previous employment history, position, job role and responsibilities, interests, education background as well as testimonials from others who have worked with them. You can also see their most recent activity and their updated movements – such as who they are recently connected to and their status updates etc. There is usually a lot you can tell about the person professionally from viewing their profile which is a huge plus for sales and marketing professionals – (if they get the research right in the first place)

What are the advantages of LinkedIn as a business contacts source?

Sign up and setup is free (although you can pay for premium account access but few do). You can then get started and build a business network of contacts over some time without any upfront investment. If you know about 50 people who you can add as connections it can give you access to up to 2 million or more contacts.

Users often provide a lot of details about themselves professionally from current position, roles, responsibilities, areas of specialization and more which can be extremely valuable to sales and marketing efforts. Since users update their profiles and information by themselves most of the data is quite reliable and makes this model one of the stronger sources in terms of data quality.

With over 25 million users signed up it provides a good range of contacts at both executive as well as deeper rooted levels.

What are the disadvantages of LinkedIn as a business contacts source?

Since is based on a networking model, the depth of contacts you will have access to is dependent on how many people you know and can connect to in your own network. If you know fewer business associates who use LinkedIn, your own network will be smaller and hence the access you have to others within the LinkedIn network will also be less.

Many high level business people do not use LinkedIn and if they do they are marked as private because for them their culture is one of only dealing with people they know who are immediately in their world rather than engaging with a wider network.

There is a lot of spamming going on within LinkedIn – people who just promote their services and do not engage with others. Often you will find yourself on the receiving end of someone from a company that does not know you and has not done their research on you or your firm so LinkedIn can feel actually up the level of competition – you must be able to stand out and researching on LinkedIn alone is often not sufficient.

Although you can identify companies by industry, size, location etc it is entirely up to the company concerned to add this information when they first do so and some types of businesses have multiple activities or are not that well defined in terms of what they actually do – making it difficult to target your exact companies that you are interested.

LinkedIn requires a lot of effort – like most things, the more time you spend on it the better, but you must have a strategy that is company or campaign wide – otherwise your message can be quickly spread in the wrong way – damaging your brand very quickly.

Although it does have a download facility it is not the best and still has to be sufficiently added to in order to make it comprehensive and useful. It’s not ideal for lists that are needed for campaigns.

Because it requires a pro-active role from individuals, and not everyone has the time or incentive to be adding to their personal profiles it is up to the individual to join and keep their profile up to date, use LinkedIn and actively engage with others.

LinkedIn tends to be sales focussed in the end rather than necessarily just sharing information and engaging with others and it can be intimidating for users who can only spend a small amount of time on it – missing a vital piece of information is very easy to do.

LinkedIn profiles don’t provide complete contact information such as postal addresses, phone numbers and email id’s. So it may not be as well suited as a direct information source to run direct mail, telemarketing or email campaigns

In Conclusion

LinkedIn I find is a great source of connections and sometimes leads but when using it for a larger business it requires a lot more work and must be combined with additional research on the businesses concerned and contact verification – remember not everyone wants to be found and not every business will be on there in the right way to enable easier targeting.

I do however, realise that there are many more advantages and disadvantages of LinkedIn – but we would like to hear your thoughts too!

An example and pre-case study for Designing Demand, West Midlands – data and company research conducted in February 2010.

Following on from our last blog, good prospect research can be fantastic – the more targeted the better.

An example of you how well your clients can be targeted is illustrated by a recent data and company research project for Designing Demand http://www.designingdemand.org.uk/.

To give you some back-ground Designing Demand was created by the Design Council and is part of the government’s national package of publicly funded business support products; Solutions for Business. It helps businesses discover how to become more innovative, more competitive and more profitable. It does this by giving managers the skills to exploit design by spotting opportunities, briefing designers and running projects that deliver.

When Business Link, West Midlands (who are delivering the Designing Demand programme in the West Midlands) looked at targeting the right sort of firms for the Designing Demand Immerse Programme they were referred to Resonata Consulting. We started off by looking at the basic characteristics of whom was right for them: Turnover, Sector, that they were private companies of a certain age, size and geography – all very well, and this is often the way we start projects – we take a funnelling approach.

However they needed to look at firms in a deeper and much more targeted manner and Resonata Consulting with Business Link, West Midlands agreed on 6 characteristics of the firms that were to be found, researched and analysed from a business development perspective.

The 6 characteristics that we agreed upon were: The Company being ambitious or having an appetite to grow, having new products/services, expansion or expansion plans, were innovative within their chosen fields, had press coverage and business awards.

Business Link, West Midlands wanted to speak to companies who displayed some or all of these traits and not always necessarily the best ones but ones who showed these traits and our client could see that the companies strived to go places.

In more detail the characteristics and other factors were:

They wanted ambitious companies or companies that showed signs of being ambitious – companies who wanted to grow and were ambitious, had plans and had lots of things genuinely happening with them . Our client wanted to engage with companies who were ambitious enough to get involved with them for their programme – in order to have the right mind-set to do a project and realise the value.

Our client also wanted to delve deeper into the financials of the firms – so they were interested in companies who had got stable finances (clever enough or diversified enough to have made it through the recession), those that were doing very well before and had taken a drop (re-alignment of priorities now necessary to get them growing again) or companies who were in growth mode (grown despite the recession and have something really special about them).

New products or services – companies that were putting investment into their products and services, firms who believed in themselves (despite the recession) and were willing to take a chance on marketing new products and services – so the business support programme could help them market their products and help them with other in the pipe-line products.

They wanted to talk to expanding companies – companies that were expanding either in the UK or Internationally were fantastic firms for them to be talking to because it further indicated growth and that brand could play a major part in this.

Innovation – our client identified that they wanted their clients to be innovative – although more of a gut feeling, a lot of the companies we found were innovative – either in their own market, the way they did business, or in their products and services. Our client had ultimately said to us we want to talk to like-minded people – what a fantastic way to get involved with a client right?

Press coverage – with all of the above most likely press coverage would come as a given, but if they had lots of interesting press it meant that had a good marketing plan, lots to say, lots to shout about and a need and a want to go out and prove to every-body that they are fantastic – again precisely the sort of attitude that our client wanted when they spoke to them.

Business Awards – the proof of the pudding – they could be trying very hard themselves on all of the above factors but if no-one else took note and rewarded them for their efforts their efforts might have gone un-noticed. Our client wanted to engage with companies that had business awards because it proved they were doing well and being recognised or applying and being recognised.

To tie all of this together and based on our deep understanding of the programme we looked at all of the above factors, the background, history and strategy of the business and made a logical and conclusive recommendation based on the company, its brand, its website, marketing materials and feel that they would benefit from and be able to be involved with the programme.

Ultimately for Business Link West-Midlands and their Designing Demand team they could not have sent out random emails, non-targeted emails, dropped leaflets on all companies in the area. They had to be precise about who they wanted to speak to because they together with Resonata Consulting had worked out that these were the types of firms who responded best and who would most likely get involved in and pro-actively engage with them in order to be good clients.

There will be more about these pieces of work in the future – but so far feedback has been excellent and our client are really starting to see results from the excellent and well researched companies we identified and analysed for them – and they are engaging with them and proceeding well with the programme and using our intelligence at all points of the sign-up and engagement process.

Paul Travers, Programme Manager at Designing Demand, Business Link West-Midlands said “We have found the data which Resonata Consulting provided to us invaluable in helping us to identify relevant companies to approach, and this has allowed us to approach them from an informed position. As a result we are seeing positive uptake of the service”.

If you would like to know more about this project and how you can target your potential clients in a much more refined manner, please contact us on challengeus@resonata.co.uk

Recently I read an interesting blog by one of our “friendly competitors” which was fittingly about SIC codes. I say fittingly because we all have competitors but the common controversy with SIC codes is that current day services companies might struggle to find themselves in the right company.
When reading the blog, I found a surprising statement which instantly raised an eyebrow with me: “While SIC codes are extremely valuable, they’re a level of granularity that is far too deep for my purposes. There are almost 1,000 SIC codes which is way too many”.
As analysts, researchers and ultimately consultants who research companies and use business data for a lot of our work I find this surprising, and perhaps outdated thinking.
I realise that for many organisations SIC codes are very useful but when it really comes to defining basic company and target types. However, SIC codes are only part of the research we undertake when doing larger scale bespoke work – research that enables us to build a database that is relevant, targeted with knowledge and insight that is genuinely useful from a business development perspective. We go much further than accruing a lot of names in financial services for example.
SIC codes can be a good starting tool for us and some of our clients certainly. But modern businesses are after a certain type of client and SIC codes go very little way to looking at what really makes these businesses stand out from each other.
Rather than hammering my point home here let’s look at some examples we have come across recently:
A client of ours wanted us to explore luxury brands, and looking at SIC codes would have been fruitless here. We needed to find them by researching very specific sectors, countries and work out what a luxury brand was to the client and if we could come to a common goal.
Universities – easy you think? Nope, we had to look for and research particular types of Universities across the world, add in Research institutes in specialist subjects and you are looking at a whole can of worms.
What about Financial institutions? Easy right, nope not them either since we were asked to look specifically for hedge funds, and they fall into the larger group of financial institutions such as insurance companies, banks, and similar organisations.
My point is that approaching the problem with SIC codes has little to do with the fact there are over 1,000 of them. Any company profiling, including SIC coding needs to be looked at from what makes these businesses different from others, where do they fit in the market, who are their clients, what products do they do, where they have come from and where they are going.
So the next time you think that you can say let’s target these types of firms, consider your strategy that bit further so you have an advantage over those who do not understand the problems with SIC codes.
Think about the pains that you solve, the challenges you solve and look at your existing clients work out what made them buy or what made you realise they had these issues.

It’s been a busy time for us lately, especially with the launch of the new website, new client briefs, existing clients coming back to us, networking and lots of client meetings but unfortunately that has meant that we have neglected the blog for a while – our aim is to update the blog once a week!

This week I wanted to talk about and touch upon data cleansing as in a recession it is perhaps even more important to keep your data up to date. After-all many of us are trying to cut costs wherever we can but we also know when to make the right investments in order to continue to speak to our current clients and on the flipside of that acquire meaningful and deeply researched data that will enable you to be speaking to the right companies for the products and/or services that you deliver.

Over time, companies collect a significant amount of existing client and new client data. They can have entire databases of lapsed, current and potential client data but it is not necessarily all accurate and actionable data.

Data cleansing is something that should be done at least twice a year (business data often decays at the rate of 40% plus per year). If you want to make the most of your existing client data so you can keep running effective campaigns, it could be time to take a second look at your existing database.
Removing incorrect details can save you time and money when prospecting potential clients, speaking to existing clients or speaking to lapsed clients.

If client data is entered incorrectly, it can cause data headaches at a later date. If that same piece of data is entered differently more than once then the two opposing records can result in an inefficient process, confused and untrusting potential clients and confused sales staff.

If you store data such as physical addresses, phone numbers or email addresses you need to make sure that the rate of duplication kept to an absolute minimum – hence my recommendation to cleanse your data at least twice a year –more if it is in consistent use. Precise data is essential business incorrect data can very easily impede on your otherwise successful sales and marketing campaigns.

So is this the sort of exercise you would like to do in-house?

Outsourcing the cleansing of your data is a much more efficient, easy and less costly exercise and you can get your be sales and marketing data in great shape without the headaches of doing it in-house.
Employ a professional organisation to give you a full data audit and you’ll be left with valid, de-duplicated data on prospects that are ready to be engaged.

The data cleansing exercise will systematically go through your data and ensure that the records your teams use remain accurate. At the same time, you can unleash a two-pronged attack on your data, cleansing it one on hand and using that data to provide new sales and marketing leads for your staff to close on the other.

So, if the reason why so many sales and marketing campaigns receive low hit rates is just incorrect data, then data cleansing is a way to invest in your company. People move companies, change jobs, transfer extensions and within a year, up to 40% of your database is out of date and incorrect.

So without putting too much of a frightener on you and just by explaining that data cleansing is an investment, some of our clients are coming around to this and at the same time buying highly researched, accurate and hard to get data from us which we know is pre-cleansed!

We have gone through a variety of processes such as design, logos, branding, technical development, tweaks, changes, re-designs and generally getting our website absolutely spot on for the business that we are!

This is our first website design and we feel that it reflects our brand, our values and our ethos very well. Our brand is all about being bespoke to client’s needs, going the extra mile, looking for great prospect opportunities and data solutions for our clients.

Resonata Consulting’s website was built by Byte Art in conjunction with huge input from Resonata Consulting. Byte Art http://www.byteart.com are an award-winning web design and development agency located in London, Bristol, Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man and Dubai. We worked with their Farringdon based office and we would like to extend our particular thanks to Andrea Tamborini who has been pro-active, diligent, patient, understanding, extremely helpful and has produced great designs for us!

Resonata Consulting would also like to thank our SEO Copywriter Oliver Lewis http://www.seo-copywriter.co.uk for the great work he did in conjunction with us on the SEO Copywriting. He is diligent, focussed and has got a keen writing style!

Resonata Consulting would also like to pay homage to our branding consultant and all round branding Guru Yvonne Fuchs http://www.thebrandingworkshop.com . Yvonne has been an excellent sounding board for us and has helped us immensely with our branding (both internally and externally). Yvonne is an inspiration to all!

Resonata Consulting would also like to thank Dr. Alan Rae http://www.howtodobusiness.com our business mentor who has helped guide us from initial late night conversations in the pub to where we are now. Alan is incredibly knowledgeable, hugely bright and is a great motivator who offers us a fantastic and pro-active advice whenever there is a need.

We would also like to thank Business Link London, The Thames Innovation Centre, Charles Dawson, Lena Robinson at Neue Media, Simon Daniels at Percassity, Peter and Kathy Baker, Ruud and Jose Vermeulen, Sara Bizanti and Dawn Canonigo.

This is from a recent branding exercise, where we explored our rationale for using the name Resonata Consulting.

So how did we get to the name?

Everybody who has gone through a similar exercise will agree it is incredibly hard to be original. Not only do you want the name to reflect your business activity, but it should also have a familiar ring to it – making it easy for people to find our company and remember you. At first we explored the straight-forward options such as for example MI-Consulting or IM Consulting. But not only were the names already registered, we felt both options reflected poor creativity and didn’t explain our services or how we wish to be perceived. To build a strong brand we would have to find a name that would:

* stand out / be unique
* be memorable
* be internationally recognizable
* explain our services or express how we wish to work with our clients

We came to the name Resonata Consulting, which reflects the essence of what we do and how we do it.

Resonata is a unique word, though it has a familiar feel to it making it memorable to clients and partners alike. It is made up from the words resonance or resonating and data, giving you an immediate impression of how our company interprets best practice: we resonate clients’ data needs – a process driven exercise with the client at heart.

Many branding experts, consultants and our advisers have consistently told us that our brand/company name had to incorporate the term data or even data acquisition – because that is what our service is all about. We struggled at first to incorporate it, but by merging the word data with resonance we did not only manage to satify the most critical of branding specialists – we also found a way to express exactly how we feel understanding client needs is as much part of data acquisition as anything else.

Because both directors have traveled extensively (Asia, Europe, North America, Central America, and South America), speak a number of different languages (English, Dutch, Spanish, French and German) and have both lived and worked abroad in various parts of the world (Europe, North-America and Asia), we knew that our services would have an international appeal. Because the word ‘Resonata’ was created by us it would have no negative cultural barriers concerning its interpretation.

Resonata Consulting had to have consulting or consultancy within the company name to emphasize we want to engage with our clients in the process. Coming from an international sales and business development background ourselves, this is the kind of company philosophy we want to be part of and are confident our clients will buy into as well.

What does Resonata Consulting mean to us:

We listen to our client’s needs and act as an extension of their organization; building on existing internal knowledge and processes, and resonating clients’ needs by understanding the clients goals and helping them to achieve the highest quality data in the most timely and financially efficient manner.